Our Team

As a joint venture, we are resourced by a combination of key individuals from both partners, and we are additionally hiring a dedicated team of talented technical resources with a common interest in cutting edge technologies.

Our Team

As a joint venture, we are resourced by a combination of key individuals from both partners, and we are additionally hiring a dedicated team of talented technical resources with a common interest in cutting edge technologies.

Huw Ringer

Co-founder & Director

Huw founded Smart Associates in 2003 and has been instrumental in its global expansion across Europe, Australasia, the USA and India. Most recently Huw has been focused on helping to create unique software and services products to help customers take the time, cost, and risk out of migrating to and managing their Data Warehouse environments; as well as creating value from cognitive machine learning cloud based services.

Aaron McDonald

Co-founder & Director

Aaron is a 20 year tech industry veteran with experience leading teams across all aspects of a technology company. Prior to launching Centrality, Aaron held leadership positions in large technology companies managing portfolios over $1b in value across engineering and architecture, product management, product development, marketing and sales.

Peter McCallum

CEO

Peter has more than 20 years’ experience in the IT industry, the last 14 of which he has worked exclusively in the Data Science, Analytics, Big Data, Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing domains. Peter has previously held senior data leadership roles in New Zealand’s largest telecommunications companies, and he has a strong practical understanding of how advanced analytics can be applied in business to deliver significant return on investment

Shaneel Prasad

Head of Platform & Technology

Shaneel has 15+ years of data management experience. He has designed and developed large scale data warehouse and analytics solutions for some of the largest financial services organisations in Australia and New Zealand.

Charles Hunt

Data Engineer

Charles is a highly experienced IT professional with an extensive career spanning “line of business” application development, system design, system construction and life cycle management; System’s analysis and design; Support and management of application infrastructure within businesses of all sizes.

Alex Wang

Senior Data Scientist

Alex has 8+ years of professional/ research experience in machine learning. He has hands-on experience in deep learning with applications in Natural Language Processing(NLP), Image Classification and Reinforcement Learning. He has previously developed the autonomous urban lands division algorithm and CNN-based satellite imagery object recognition prototype for New Zealand Smart City Programme.

Nick Probert

Advisor

Nick has an extensive background in corporate finance having held senior roles at JP Morgan, Bank of America and Nomura. Most recently Nick ran the continental Europe and Middle East legal and compliance teams for Nomura. Nick is now based in London, UK.

Roy Hammett

HR & Ops

With over 30 years IT experience, Roy has had a long association with Smart Associates and is now helping Causality establish their HR systems, policies and procedures, digital marketing and website, operational Human Resources management, and is providing recruitment services.

Edgar Valdez

Data Visualization

Edgar is an Information Designer who translates data into compelling visualizations in any form (reports, dashboards, infographics, etc.) in order to meet the needs of the business. Through his 12+ years of commercial experience Edgar has developed a unique ability to combine narrative and design principles to build stronger insights and data stories to enlighten users, trigger actions and drive change.

Eric Lim

Data Scientist

Eric is a data professional with passion across big data technologies, advanced analytics and productisation of ideas. Eric has background in applied mathematics, statistics and computer science with experience in administrative data, utility business and digital marketing.

Our Partners

Auckland-based Centrality is one of the leading, blockchain venture studios in the world, with a growing team of 75 people across Auckland, London, Melbourne and Singapore. They’re backed by a global investor network who understand their vision – to help the world transition to a blockchain-enabled future.

As a decentralised eco-system, Centrality connects different applications together using Blockchain powered technology. This technology allows businesses to work together to gain scale through shared acquisition of customers, data, merchants and content. Blockchain enables smarter transactions because it’s managed by a network, not any one central authority. We call this ‘decentralisation’, which basically means the network operates on a peer-to-peer basis – no middle man.

Centrality has built a scalable platform, software and a library of components that businesses can use as building blocks to create a decentralised business.

Formed in 2003, Smart Associates has gained a reputation and an extensive background in the provision of data warehouses and data lakes. Implementation sizes range from 50Tb to 5Pb giving business insights and capabilities previously un-catered for. The company has people with work experience across data architecture, data science, software development, product support, management consultancy, legal and finance. They have managed large data migration and integration projects for clients in retail, insurance, banking, financial services, telecoms, healthcare and other industries in both Europe and Asia Pacific. They are experts in combining and enriching data from multiple internal and external sources.

Smart Associates has a global presence with hubs in both Europe and Asia Pacific and a global client base supported by data engineering and data science skills around the clock. This is achieved, in part, through partnerships with key providers such as IBM, Oracle, Hortonworks, Thoughtspot and DataRobot and now Centrality, through the use of their own repeatable and scalable processes and products.